Karel Häring shoots for gap on Czech market with quarterly delivering deep
explorations of football culture

Football Club is a new Czech-language quarterly that delivers long-form
articles on various aspects of domestic and international soccer culture
and history. Inspired by similar titles around Europe such as the UK’s
The Blizzard, it was created by Karel Häring, a well-known football
writer, and Czech Radio journalist Jan Kaliba. In his introduction to the
first edition of Football Club, Häring recalls that when he was at the
newspaper Sport the target readers were “factory workers rather than
university graduates”. So, I asked him, is the new journal aimed at
intellectuals?

“But it’s true that the length of the articles is definitely something
new here in the Czech Republic.

“Because the trend in recent years in newspapers is for the articles to
get shorter. And articles on websites are even briefer.

“So we think there is a gap on the market.

“We don’t know how many people will be interested in it, but we think
it’s something that you couldn’t find here.

“This is the reason we started to do it.”

Why did you go for the English-language name Football Club?

“It’s a long story. I have to say it wasn’t easy to find a name for
the magazine that wouldn’t be too stupid or something.

“We had many, many ideas. First we tried one-word names. We thought
about Chilena, which is a kind of goal in Spanish. Golazo, which is a term
for a really wonderful goal.

“But we found those too far for Czech readers…”

Also the name Panenka was already taken by a Spanish magazine.

“Yes! That’s an absolutely fantastic name for a magazine. Very simple,
but it’s a word that the whole world knows because of the famous penalty.

“And one morning, a Sunday morning, I think, I remembered that I always
liked the words ‘football club’, because they represented the Western
part of Europe.

“I always liked the words ‘football club’, because they represented
the Western part of Europe.”

“I thought, Yes, it’s simple, it may be in English but everybody in
the world of football will understand what it means.”

You also talk about trying to kind of foster a football culture in the
Czech Republic. What is football culture like here at present?

“I’m a little bit pessimistic about Czech football culture. I’m not
talking now about problems to do with the Czech FA and other things like
this.

“When I think about supporter culture, what I miss here in the Czech
Republic is that we don’t really have a passion for football, if I
compare it to other cultures: England, Germany of course, Spain.

“We talk about football. We can criticise. We are fans who talk in the
pubs, but who don’t show the same kind of passion for clubs or the
national team as supporters do in other countries.”

Several well-known Czech journalists are known for supporting usually
English Premier League clubs. Erik Tabery supports Chelsea. Jindřich
Šídlo, who writes in the first edition of Football Club, supports
Arsenal. But I have a sense that many Czech intellectuals look down on all
sport in a way that doesn’t happen in the West. Do you think that’s
true?

“I have the same feeling.

“You mentioned a couple of very well-known names.

“What I find interesting here if I compare it with England, because I
read English papers and magazines every day, so I have some knowledge about
it, is that in the Czech Republic you have to be careful if you want to
say, I support this club.

“Of course journalists can’t openly support some club. But if don’t
support any football club, you’re not a football fan.

“I love the Premier League. Of course I have one club which I prefer or
support the most.

“But here you try to hide it, because someone can criticise you and say,
You support Liverpool and you are writing about Manchester United, who you
don’t like?!

“Getting back to your question, there are only very few journalists, not
only football journalists, who write about football.

“There are a few celebrities, actors, like Ladislav Hampl, who openly
supports Slovan Liberec.

“That’s nice – I think there should be more of that here.”

Is there a tradition of football fanzines in the Czech Republic? I guess
they were big in England 20 or 25 years ago, though they may have moved
online now with the likes of Arseblog and so on. Has there been a tradition
of fanzines here?

“I have to come back to the passion of Czech football fans.

“I can’t say I have explored whether there are fanzines, but I don’t
think it would be something like… I remember when I came to Anfield Road,
you can buy official magazines, but there are also guys standing and
shouting, selling their own magazines.

“I don’t think there is culture of this here in the Czech Republic.”

“We talk in pubs but who don’t show the same kind of passion as
supporters do in other countries.”

Tell us about the image on the cover of Football Club. It looks like a
classic team from maybe the end of the 19th century, with guys in caps and
heavy looking hooped shirts.

“We thought about the cover because it was our very first issue.

“We wanted to start with the first ever 11 here in this country.

“The picture is from I think 1889. It was the first official 11, at
Loučeň Castle.

“The guy who founded it was the son of the owner of the castle and he
had come back from Cambridge…”

He was some aristocrat?

“Yes. He started to play football with other guys. It was the first
official 11, so we wanted to start with this picture on the first edition.

“Also I like the dog in the picture – it’s very funny.”

In the first edition also you have the diary of Jozef Štibrányi, who was
a member of the Czechoslovak team that reached the final of the World Cup
in 1962. Will history be a regular part of Football Club?

“And when I find such articles in Four Four Two or The Blizzard I find
them very interesting. You can find a lot of topics there.

“This is one of our main targets. I don’t want to say we want to
educate readers, but we want to offer articles that can help readers find
new information.”

Football Club is something between a magazine and a book, I guess. It’s
sold not in newsagents but in the sports sections of bookshops. Has it been
hard to explain to either bookshops or potential readers just what it is?

“Of course, it looks strange, because people here are used to reading
magazine with colour pages, colour photographs.

“This is something really new so we have very short experience and we
can’t make any statements about results.

“We don’t know yet how many copies have been sold in bookshops. We
only know how many subscriptions there are.

“We’re waiting for the first numbers. The main target now is to get
the magazine to as many people as possible.”

You have articles in Football Club from other European magazines and I get
the impression that there’s a kind of European network of journalists
like you, who write for The Blizzard, or Nutmeg in Scotland or Panenka in
Spain.

“I think there’s a nice solidarity from journalists in Europe and in
future issues we want to invite journalists from South America, from
Africa.

“Working in England was like a holiday for me, because when I came to
London I realised it was worth doing football journalism.”

“I worked for Sport for 16 years so I had some contacts. Like for
instance Ben Littleton, who is a very good English independent journalist.

“In the past I cooperated with him and then I asked him for an article,
so in issue two he will have a very nice article from him about the art of
management.

“Or Ivan Zhidkov from Russia, he was thrilled by the idea and didn’t
ask for payment – he was just happy to contribute to our very first
issue.

“So I think there is a nice solidarity among journalists.”

Maybe this is slightly off the point, but are there any decent Czech
football podcasts?

“There is one, done by guys from Czech TV. Every week they have
interesting guests, like Jaromír Bosák and other journalists.

“If we are the first with Football Club as a quarterly magazine, I think
they are among the first with a podcast, because there is just a very short
history of podcasting here.”

You’ve been a football journalist for many years. What have been your
standout experiences as a reporter on football?

“Many, many experiences. Of course all the World Cups. Brazil was
probably the highlight, because there was only one country that I would
have liked more to visit for a World Cup and it’s England, where football
was born.

“So Brazil was definitely the top. I liked all the World Cups, all the
Euros.

“I used to go to England every December when the Czech league finished
after the autumn part.

“I went to England to interview Petr Čech and Tomáš Rosický and for
me it was very refreshing.